Monday, September 28, 2009

[ Originally posted at Feministe at the end of my guest-blogging stint there. I'm reposting it here now, just cuz. ]

Well it's been good chillin in these parts for a bit and catching
the action these past couple weeks, but the time has come to
respectfully bow out with a bittersweet smile, with a warm embrace to
our hosts and the new friends I've made. And maybe one more tequila
shot before hitting the after-party. Tequila distilled from the blue
agave pulp of the soul. Perhaps a few parting sentiments, befitting a
return to the road.

What I'm feeling, at this particular time, at this point in my life,
is the familiar recognition that there's no real home for me in this
earthly sphere, only criss-crossed paths across the surface of this
spinning planet. It's often said that life is a journey; all of us are
in transition, marching side-by-side from unknown into unknown. I do
understand that folks sometimes experience a different feeling of home,
of bodily belonging, of sitting still and satiated atop ancestral roots
pushed deep into the earth. I've had moments, now and then, here and
there, where the hunger and the restlessness and the winding road melt
from my being and all that's left is wholeness. Maybe that's what we're
all after.

But I think many of us who are children of diaspora, children of the
displaced and the unwelcome, tend not to expect so much. We grow up
with constant reminders that we're a long way from home, surrounded by
hostile strangers, barred from the center of the public square, shoved
into the shadows. They don't much like our kind round here, we are told in a million large and small ways, we are the ugly ones, the inadequate and intrusive ones, the spoilers of the pristine landscape.
For such children of diaspora, there can be no homecoming. Locals in
our adopted homes yell at us to "go home". And our ancestral homes have
been taken from us -- by invaders and colonizers, by wars and
circumstances and decisions, by distance, by time.

~ ~ ~

Every diasporic community is, of course, unique. Every people,
indeed every family and every individual, has a unique story. I enjoy
learning about all those stories. I like contemplating both the
differences and similarities between the experiences of all the
variegated groups that have ended up bouncing off each other like
billiard balls here in the so-called New World. Understanding how we
got here helps me understand where we are.

Understanding where we are, for me, began as a teenager, with a
headlong plunge into my mom's bookshelf of African American literature.
My mother had been an anti-war and civil rights activist in the 1960s,
when she first arrived in this country, literally fresh off a cargo
boat from China after 3 months of lashing waves, tumultuous weather,
and unwanted advances by seamen. Arriving on these golden shores, my
mother had been troubled by the racism she discovered and had hit the
books to try to understand the forces that were tearing her new country
apart. She accumulated writings by James Baldwin, Richard Wright,
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, among others. She marched with
progressive activists. In the 1980s, in my teens, I followed those
footsteps. Her dusty dog-eared collection of Black literature opened
the doors. It was my formal entry into anti-racism. I never turned back.

It's been crucial for my journey as an Asian American citizen and
activist to seriously, studiously, steadily explore and contemplate
African American and Native American history and experience. I believe
that it's impossible for Americans of any stripe to grasp our own
existence on this continent without first grasping those foundations.
Obviously I'm steeped in Asian American history and culture, but the
unique centrality of Native American and African American
stories are not lost on me. To me, those are stories which bring us to
both the vital spiritual source and the bleeding soul wound at the
heart of US society. That's how we got here. That's who we are. That's
the electrical signal within our own heartbeat. Whiteness may attempt
to negate this reality, or twist it into metallic square-brained
convolutions devoid of visceral meaning, or set communities of color
against each other by overplaying the gulfs between us and underplaying
what we share; but the truths of our genocidal past, the Door of No
Return, the Trail of Broken Treaties, as well as the bounty of gifts
we've been given by all the forgotten, burn in my chest and in my eyes
every day that I look upon the world.

~ ~ ~

In 1963, my father made the journey from Taiwan to the United States
by way of East Africa. You could say that he took the long way here. My
father's family had ended up on the Kuomingtang-controlled island of
Taiwan in the 1940s, after having been displaced from the mainland by
the traumatic convulsions of the Japanese invasion in World War II and
the Chinese civil war.

Both of my paternal grandparents were doctors, and in the early
1960s they took jobs working for the World Health Organization in
Ethiopia. They gradually maneuvered their family toward a new life in
the US, like moving chess pieces, one slip of paper at a time, one
family member at a time. Being the eldest son, my father stayed behind
in Taiwan the longest and took care of family business. All three of
his younger siblings were already in the US by the time it was his turn
to make a move. It was a big move. He made his way through Hong Kong,
Bangkok, Bombay, Beirut, and Cairo, before arriving in the Ethiopian
capital of Addis Ababa. From there, he traveled northwest to the
ancient city of Gonder, where he met up with his parents.

Reflecting on it now, I realize what a profound impact this voyage
must have had on my father, and consequently on me. It was an
experience which shattered the horizons of his 22-year-old mind and
opened his eyes to the grand scale and spectacular diversity of
humanity -- a vision which he passed on to me. In his memoir, my father
writes:

Ethiopia is an ancient country with three thousand years
of history. It looks over the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, and is
connected to Egypt by the Nile. The kings of this country had always
claimed that they were descendants of Queen Sheba and King Solomon.
Legend has it that the beautiful Queen Sheba went to visit King Solomon
in Jerusalem, and later bore him a son, who became the founder of
Ethiopia. Gonder is not far from the source of the Blue Nile, one of
two major tributaries of the Nile. I once took a car to the hilly
country nearby and looked down at the source of this world-famous
river. You could say that I revered or even worshipped the Nile, but I
had actually learned only isolated facts and lacked a historical sense
to comprehend what I was seeing; it was as if I was able to mumble a
few lines of poetry but knew not what they signified. I can only recall
that when I looked at the source of the Nile, I murmured lines of
Confucius, "It passes on just like this, not ceasing day or night," and
the poem, "I live by one end of the Long River, and you by the other
end. I think of you day by day. I long to see you, but in vain. We
drink by the same river."

During his time in Gonder, my father met Ethiopian Christians and
Ethiopian Jews, Israelis, Russians, Iranians. They were doctors,
students, and patients at the medical center where my grandparents
worked. He eventually managed to obtain a student visa from the US
consulate, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
finally got rid of racist quotas imposed during the Chinese Exclusion
era, which had essentially barred Chinese folks from US citizenship and
public life since they began arriving in the 1850s. So my father said
goodbye to his parents in Ethiopia and set off on the second leg of his
journey, through Asmara (which was then part of Ethiopia but is now the
capital of Eritrea) and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, where he boarded a
flight to Athens. He passed through Zurich, Rome, and Paris, before
flying to New York and setting foot on the continent where he would
meet up with my mother and raise children, my sister and me. That's how
I got here.

~ ~ ~

In 2001 I made a pilgrimmage back to ancestral lands.
My great-grandfather's house, where he made burlap sacks for a living,
is still standing in a small village with mud roads where literally
everyone shares the same surname. I visited the Japanese prison camps
where the Chinese had been subjected to human experimentation for the
development of biological and chemical weapons, as well as slave labor
for industrial development of the Japanese imperial army which the US
faced in the Pacific theater. Approximately 10 million Chinese people
died during World War II, yet this isn't even worth a footnote in the
US. Most US Americans have no idea that the Chinese land war against
Japan had at least as much to do with their defeat as the US naval war.

That's how these journeys oftentimes go: we unearth geologies of
bloodshed, tectonic plates of pain. We can't imagine the cruelty and
horror which our forebearers endured. Yet somehow we made it, and here
we stand, upon the blood-soaked earth, under the aura of our ancestors.

My pilgrimmage ended at a remote mountain lake known as Tian Chi,
which is usually translated as "Lake of Heaven" but which I prefer to
call simply The Sky Pool. It's a sacred spot draped in legend and mist
and shimmering light. I sat on the shore meditating and gazing into the
dark waters. That's where I saw with definitive clarity that I could
never go home, neither in China where my grandparents fled invading
armies, nor in the US where my mind and body were formed. I would
always be a child of diaspora. Gazing into those misty depths, I saw
that ultimately we are all children of diaspora, scattered across the
planet over eons of exodus like stars strewn across the sky. We are all
migrants. We are all members of the Human Diaspora. Our only home is a
bottomless Sky Pool where endless visions of countless tragi-comedies
gather and dissolve. "I live by one end of the Long River, and you
by the other end. I think of you day by day. I long to see you, but in
vain. We drink by the same river."

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The ugly history of enforcement rhetoric in modern US
politics winds its way from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, by way of
Bill Clinton. It's a history of cynical deception and manipulation
based on racist fear and violent lust for domination and subjugation,
conceived and championed by Republicans but all too often embraced by
the slide-rule triangulations of Beltway Democrats preoccupied more
with the engineerings of government power than the lives and struggles
of the governed.

Richard Nixon knew exactly what he was doing when he ran his 1968
presidential campaign on the two philosophically inconsistent promises
of enforcing law and order and stopping big government.
Those tenets were never meant to be substantive or even rational. In
fact, it was better for them to be jarringly irrational, because that
was part of their acid-gut appeal, a Colbertian anti-intellectual
assertion of primal fear over reason. In the midst of the 60s urban
uprisings and race riots, these were smashface calls for white identity politics,
explicitly designed to mobilize an emotionally volatile backlash
against the Civil Rights movement and the imagined derailing of the
1950s White American Dream.

Nixon's enforcement rhetoric ("tough on crime", "law and order") implicitly promised to crack down on brown people and put them back in their place at the bottom of society; while the attacks on "big government" generated false narratives that white magnanimity had gone too far and had resulted in dangerous hoardes of ungrateful welfare leeches
who soaked up tax dollars, benefited from racial quotas, and gave
nothing back to society. These constructs were, of course, not grounded
in any sort of measurable reality. They were strictly drawn from the
deep well of racism, built into the very foundation of this nation,
seared into the psyche of every US American as solidly as the opening
words of the Constitution.

As the renowned Republican strategist Lee Atwater put it in a 1981 interview with Bob Herbert on the so-called "Southern Strategy":

By 1968
you can't say "n----r". That hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff
like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting
so abstract now [...] because obviously sitting around saying "We want
to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a
hell of a lot more abstract than "N----r, n----r!"

Not a particulary refined or elevated political strategy. But Nixon
rode it to victory in 1968, as did Ronald Reagan in 1980 ("welfare
queens") and George H. W. Bush in 1988 (Willie Horton). The lesson that
Washington DC's professional class of electoral manipulators drew from
these outcomes was that national politicians could always count on the
racism of white America.

Thus the rise of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council
in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than confront and expose the GOP's debased
demagoguery; rather than elevate national discourse by aggressively
defending the strides of the Civil Rights movement and attacking racist
fearmongering using a principled grown-up language based on human
rights; rather than expand the dwindling electorate by reaching into
disenfranchised communities who would respond well to a message of
progressive populism, the Democratic Party ceded the debate to the most
reactionary forces in US politics and adopted the discourse of coded
racist narratives.

Bill Clinton won the presidency, ended "welfare as we know it",
ended "the era of big government", doubled the prison population with
mandatory minimums and an explosion of privatized prison construction,
slapped NAFTA onto the continent unleashing new levels of unemployment,
homelessness, and cross-border migration, and generally devastated
countless communities of color.

~ ~ ~

Today, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are
apparently on the verge of tackling "comprehensive immigration reform"
(CIR) once and for all. How will the debate play out? Exactly which
policies will and will not constitute CIR? What political ploys and
marketing schemes are DC consultants, motivated primarily by the desire
to notch a "win" on their resumes, whispering into the ears of
Democratic politicians and mass media lackeys? What legislative package
will eventually be passed into law? And what tangible effects will that
law have on the lives and struggles of both worthy and "unworthy" members of our communities?

Those questions remain up in the air, and the answers that
eventually fall into place will depend in part on the strength and
adamancy with which people of conscience assert the voice and power of
a mobilized and progressive civic society on the public debate as it
unfolds.

As I see it, a fundamental starting point for embarking upon the
path to CIR is rejecting the racially-coded enforcement rhetoric which
has characterized a great deal of the xenophobic hysteria and racial
hatred of our country's reactionary anti-immigrant forces. I describe
this rhetoric as the language of the Leviathan, in reference to Hobbesian
political theory, because it reduces the rule of law to the most base
human impulses of domination and subjugation, promulgating the
submission of individual liberty to the draconian sovereignty of ruler
and state by means of a unilateral monopoly on coercive violence.

Obviously every society requires laws, ethical norms, rules of
social conduct. But law should elevate society rather than debase it,
and the sleight of hand inherent in Nixonian enforcement rhetoric is
the manner in which it truncates democratic dialogue and social
progress by falsely representing a corrupt and outdated legal,
intellectual, and moral framework as a legitimate foundation for
reform, when in fact reform must begin with a new, revitalized
framework. As the Clinton years demonstrated, liberals cannot adopt
reactionary rhetoric as a political tactic and then expect anything
other than reactionary social results.

Unfortunately, DC Dems are showing seedy signs of supineness, with "leading" liberal figures such as Senator Charles Schumer resorting
to cartoonishly-cynical "get tough" posturing and even President Obama
blurting loaded exhortations to "get to the back of the line". What
line? There's no line, there's never been one; it's always been a
rigged game. The first folks to be singled out to "get in line" were the Chinese.
The vast majority of European folks who came to this country, whether
in pursuit of genocidal land grabs or as penniless workers or both,
faced no line. Only certain groups are berated with that barked order.
Now descendants of those Europeans actually think they have a stronger
claim to this continent than the indigenous people themselves.

When
Democrats concede that the proper starting point is fear and revulsion
of the Alien Other, they adopt the lens of xenophobia and feed the
toxic environment in which race-based violence is bred. This stance is
not productive nor is it rooted in truth. [...]

“Go
to the back of the line” is an intentionally punitive and domineering
phrase. But instead of stroking our desire to dominate the new
outsiders, we would benefit from a discussion on the manyways in which “the line” has brokendown.
From human trafficking rings in which foreign nationals are lured into
exploitative US jobs, to foreign-born soldiers denied earned
citizenship, the system is overwhelmed with a backlog of over 200,000 cases.

Even if rationalized as standard political posturing, any validation of language and ideas promoted by fringe elements that act violently to defend
a “disappearing culture” from “illegals” cannot be excused. [...] Who
will give the Democrats a tough talk? Who will tell them that in order
to rise above the well-entrenched practices of the Right, they will
need to be daring, intelligent, and original? Who will assure them they
possess the ability to be both honest and victorious?

Indeed those who spout the language of the Leviathan can never serve
the cause of social progress, because their tongues are tied to the
rigid despotism of the state rather than the rising aspirations of
downtrodden communities.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march from Selma to Montgomery
in 1965, he was disobeying a federal court injunction; his mainstream
critics decried this "illegal" march and a majority of US public
opinion disapproved of the action. But something strange happened after
that march. The winds shifted. Hardened positions became more fluid.
Even in white America, a flicker of self-doubt flashed across social
consciousness. Openings appeared in the fabric of society and the
impossible suddenly became possible. Addressing a nationally televised
joint session of Congress two days after the first Selma march,
President Lyndon Johnson famously declared:

What
happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into
every section and state of America. It is the effort of American
Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but
really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of
bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

It is said that a single tear rolled down Dr. King's cheek when he heard that line on TV.

The Voting Rights Act passed 5 months later, not because Washington
insiders hatched the right marketing scheme with the correct
compromises, but because people grounded in a moral vision of social
justice stood up, walked forward with heads held high, and didn't back
down in the face of the Leviathan.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

In recent weeks, the startling story
of Cirila Baltazar Cruz has been stirring outrage and splitting spleens
in certain corners of blogland, though it has yet to receive mainstream
attention. Some details remain fuzzy, and we have yet to hear directly
from the person at the center of the story, Ms. Cruz herself; and
indeed we aren't likely to hear from her anytime soon because her case
is currently under a court gag order.

Here's what we have so far: Cirila Baltazar Cruz gave birth to a
baby girl, Rubi Juana, on November 16, 2008, at the Singing River
Hospital in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It is, as you might imagine, a predominantly white area. The hospital provided Cruz with a Spanish
interpreter. However, Cruz doesn't speak Spanish; she speaks Chatino,
an indigenous language from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Two days after
the birth, the hospital reported the baby as a neglected child to the
Department of Human Services, after which Rubi Juana Cruz was promptly
taken from her mother and placed in the custody of an affluent couple
in Ocean Springs.

According to court records obtained by The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger,
the child was deemed neglected in part because Cruz "has failed to
learn the English language" which "placed her unborn child in danger
and will place the baby in danger in the future". In addition, the
hospital report noted that Cruz "was an illegal immigrant" who was
"exchanging living arrangements for sex".

Of course, it's a bit of a mystery how they were able to establish
these facts when there were apparently no Chatino-speakers on hand.
More to the point: it's irrelevant. I'm no legal expert, but in my
understanding, immigration status, language skills, and
highly-questionable allegations of sex work are not grounds for
snatching a baby from her mother and initiating adoption proceedings.
But that's exactly what's happening. The case is currently in the
Jackson County Youth Court, where Cruz is being represented by the
Southern Poverty Law Center. As mentioned, the case is under gag order
so it's been difficult to get updates on the situation and the fate of
Rubi Juana remains unknown.

The case is not unique. In 2005, the Lebanon (Tenn.) Democrat, revealed
that, at least twice, a local judge ordered Mexican mothers to learn
English -- or lose their children forever. [...] In one case the child
still lived with the mother, in the other the child was in foster care.
In both cases, the mothers spoke an indigenous language rather than
Spanish.

Over at Vivir Latino,
Maegan La Mamita Mala places the story in the larger context of the
"good immigrant vs. bad immigrant" narrative which has come to dominate
mainstream liberal discourse in the immigration debate:

Quick. Choose. The house is burning and you have to choose. Your mother or your child? Who do you save?

Your mother, Maegan writes, "didn’t make it like Sonia Sotomayor.
Didn’t graduate from college and in fact can’t even speak English". On
the other hand, your child has assimilated, can speak English, has
received a formal education, and "won’t be a burden on the system".

Is it the correct choice to abandon your unassimilated mother?

This is the morally untenable dead-end into which liberals propel
themselves when they adopt tactical discourse which appeases the
xenophobic forces of the right-wing for the sake of electoral
expediency, rather than a discourse fundamentally grounded in universal
human rights.

Now I'm not suggesting any less respect for the remarkable
achievements of someone like Sonia Sotomayor. But when liberals hold
her up as the shining example of The American Story -- a model minority,
a false compliment with which Asian Americans are all too familiar --
they are actually Othering the majority of immigrants, ordinary
hard-working people who have never had the opportunities or life
situations or sheer good fortune to rise to such societal heights. The
implication is that those less-accomplished immigrant stories are
somehow less American, and therefore those other immigrants are unworthy of the magnanimous acceptance extended by the mainstream to a select few.

What is the plight of the unworthy? Ask Cirila Baltazar Cruz.

Please consider writing, faxing, or calling the presiding judge in
this case and asking that (1) Rubi Juana be re-united with her mother,
and (2) all adoption proceedings against the will of the mother be
stopped. Here's the contact info:

ETA: Thanks to Maegan for sending me this radio interview, recorded on June 1, in which we hear from Cirila Baltazar Cruz herself (in Spanish and Chatino).

Cruz says she doesn’t know why they took her daughter, though she
calls herself “ignorant” for not being able to speak Spanish or English
(though she does speak some Spanish, as you can hear in the interview).
She’s a homeowner in Oaxaca with two other children being cared for by
her family there. She works at a Chinese restaurant in Biloxi and lives
in an apartment owned by her employer — an arrangement which the
hospital interpreter either misunderstood or misrepresented. Cirila
says that the interpreter told her that she must leave her Chinese
employer or lose her baby; furthermore, the interpreter offered her a
job with a wealthy family who would take care of the child. When she
refused the offer, the interpreter became irritated with her, and we
know the rest.

Cruz says she wants her daughter back. All the information she
receives from the court is in English. It was her cousin Esteban who
implored the Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Alliance
(MIRA) to get involved, which is how we now know about this case. Vicky
Cintra of MIRA (also interviewed) says red flags went up at the
organization when they learned that Esteban had been barred from
serving as an interpreter for Cirila at the hospital, even though he
repeatedly offered; he was told he would be arrested if he didn’t
leave. MIRA claims that the family that took custody of Rubi Juana are
lawyers with connections to the judge; they threw a baby shower to
greet Rubi’s arrival.

November 18 is the next court date. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Over at A Book Without A Cover, Adele has put up a post announcing the upcoming celebration of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th birthday. In honor of this prodigious Detroit icon and her ongoing legacy of tireless social activism, I'm reposting a Zuky piece I wrote upon reading her autobiography a couple of years ago. Happy Birthday, Grace!

Grace Lee Boggs — Living for Change

In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.

Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.

Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the
Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace
spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard
College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into
radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist
Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.

In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question
of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union
(following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A
majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet
Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A
minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max
Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:

Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past
rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World
War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main
reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R.
James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way
back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black,
and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch
was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an
American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and
the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade
I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume
1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic,
both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel
and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours
sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel,
checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning
of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years,
until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]

To
study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York
after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's
house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I
rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you
could live in New York for very little money. [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]

Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity. I
visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's
compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting
to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been
inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had
seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by
World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent
scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example
and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The
Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th
Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by
Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go
to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night),
or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's,
owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and
Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of
the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to
her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new
milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.

Grace's
work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954
she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom,
who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her
activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom
she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.

As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a
series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political
development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on
the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power
movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms
with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical
reflections as she looks
back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us
something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her
beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a
revolutionary tale.

I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:

I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American
female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been
born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early
on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not
been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching
philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active
participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the
last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]

I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the
spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested
it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building
activities.

At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was
still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed,
whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you
lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for
decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create
yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more
acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to
Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the
country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree
that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]

When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class
Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been
involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even
worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially
a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose
understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy
had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were
only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese
American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was
an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of
his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this
country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his
people would be among those deciding its economic and political future.

Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published. [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ]
To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the
British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence
during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the
time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but
firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United
States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution,
"I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know
the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society
of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such
different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life
together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of
the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With
this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the
new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as
they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if
older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated
to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as
people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make
ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to
make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country
that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud
to call our own.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Unfortunately I've been forced to concede defeat to my squirrel-nemesis in my attempts to grow corn. Every corn stalk I've grown has gotten dug up. It's been a slaughter. So today I switched gears and planted spinach and peppers where the corn used to be. We'll see if my nemesis continues to taunt me. In the meantime, the two remaining sisters are doing quite well. Below you see a juicy-looking bean pod and a couple of zucchini flowers.

Friday, June 19, 2009

On this day in 1982, Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, at his own bachelor party, by racist white auto workers in Detroit who blamed Japan for layoffs in the US auto industry. The murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail."

On July 14, 2008, Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by racist white teens shouting anti-Mexican epithets, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The murderers, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were convicted of simple assault. Two days ago, they were respectively sentenced to 6 and 7 months in county jail. Piekarsky's lawyer Frederick Fanelli said, "You would be proud to have any of these kids in your classroom, and any of them as your children."

Reflection

Through holding together, restraint is certain to come about. The yielding obtains the decisive place, and those above and those below correspond with it. Strong and gentle; the strong is central and its will is done. This is called the Taming Power of the Small.

Ongoing Echoes from the Women of the Long House (Feb-2009)The word Haudenosaunee (pronounced "ho-de-no-SHO-nee") means "People of the Long House" and refers both to the architectural style of their wood-framed living structures and to the inclusivity of their society. The connection between the Haudenosaunee and early US feminists is not tenuous; it is plainly documented.

The Palin’ Identity (Nov-2008)The reason why the McCain-Palin campaign has appeared erratic throughout the election season is that their strategic communications have been conceived and crafted according to the language of implicit cultural code rather than explicit thematic cohesion.

The Whiteness Problem (Apr-2009)The backhanded boycott of the historic UN anti-racism conference in Geneva by mostly-white diplomats from Western nations is farcical on its face and provides a handy illustration that the great problem of the 21st century is the whiteness problem.

Midsummer, the woods of Southwestern Connecticut buzz with bright pastoral magic. This gallery attempts to capture a quick arbitrary sliver of that brightness. Most of these pictures were taken in my immediate neighorhood; some were shot at Wampus Pond; some at the Audubon Fairchild Wildflower Garden.